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Three days ago I got an interesting email. It was from this guy who wanted to know how to get visitors. The reason why he asked me of all people was because he had heard I experimented with ways to get visitors and that I had over a thousand unique visitors a day. I was very flattered, because I don’t usually get this type of emails. Sadly, I don’t get a thousand visits per day but I’m actually trying to work out ways to promote my website. After I had given the email some thought I decided to write this article. I hope it can be useful to you. The post is pointed towards bloggers but anyone with a website can learn something.

Planing & and setting up the site

The first thing you should know is that making a new website and establish it on the Internet is hard, very hard.  The biggest mistake people do these days is that they don’t ask themselves what they want to achieve with their website. Lets take a personal website or a blog as an example. There are a few different types out there:

• There are the personal blog writing about everyday life. This type is mainly pointed towards people you know well already. You’ll never get much visitors(unless you got lots and lots of friends) but instead a few returning ones.
• There are the portfolio or/and fan site for more famous people like http://john-howe.com for example, the website of the famous painter John Howe. If you can market yourself and what you do well enough you’ll have a great number of visitors. This requires that you have something about yourself that stands out.
• This last one is a blog where you write about things everybody with an interest in the topic can read, like a blog about sports or politics. In this one the key to recognition is marketing.

If you want to make a fan site about someone or something you must be aware that you should check how many sites with that topic there are out there already. Since most visitors are drawn to the largest and most well known site you’ll have a hard time growing in size. This includes communities which I believe to be the hardest site to start up.

Now when you have an idea which you think is good the next step is to set up the site. It’s good if you get a domain name, http://yoursite.com or something like that. It’ll make your site more accessible to your visitors and return higher in search results. When you build your website, make the text easy to read and the design appealing, otherwise your visitors will leave asap.  Remember that it’s better to keep the design simple than scaring your visitors away. You must look at your site with critical eyes and ask yourself if a visitor would actually stay on this website or continue to some other more interesting.

Marketing

When you feel you got a done website you can be proud of - never promote half complete websites - it’s time to move on to the part where you start getting visitors. This requires heavy work. Take a day which you not spend at the computer and think where you could promote your website. The ideas will probably come when you don’t want them to come. Some examples you could use follows below:

• If you paint, publish your art at every website you can imagine along with a link to the site. I had a period when I painted the British actress Emma Watson(Hermione Granger in Harry Potter) a lot and I found out that I could send my art to her website and get it displayed in front of thousands of visitors.  I also sent some art to other fan sites and asked for comments in different forums.
• Get a feed to your blog and send it to websites that list blogs.
• Get a Digg button form digg.com(you can see one at the bottom of this page) and digg every post you write. It’ll appear on their website and even for an uninteresting post you’ll get some more visitors.
• Add your site to various lists of blogs.
• Try becoming a guru at some website or forum with a topic that interests you or participate in open source project. Add  links in your member profile.

The more links you add the higher up your site will come in search results. Always write your blogposts with care and try not to do any spelling mistakes.

If you’re a web designer and  want to promote your work, try writing an article for A List Apart, make a theme for a fan site, make a theme for wordpress or drupal or some other open source cms and link to the site.

All these things can give you visitors to your site and a name on the Internet.

Conclusion

With some hard work and an iron will you can become a known person on the Internet and gain visitors to your website. All it takes is to try to fantasize a little. Remember that a website with out links to it is nothing. When you go to a site you just don’t type something into your browser do you? And a new site without a specific topic wont end up high in search results either.

Have you succeeded and made it to the top? Don’t forget to maintain your “advertising”.

Good luck!!!